ALL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
We operate The Boone Family Art Gallery in the new Center for the Arts and an additional gallery in the "V" building, near the Center for the Arts. (The Gallery on the Quad, which hosted exhibitions since 1969, was closed by the college administration in January 2014 and remodeled to serve as an administrative "conference center.")
The galleries are always closed Sundays and school holidays. Hou
06/25/2023
Great feature Self-Service, our current gallery exhibition!
Self-Service Portfolio Exhibition at Boone Family Gallery PCC Spring 2023 – PCC Courier By: Teri Barton Posted on June 25, 2023June 25, 2023 Author Recent Posts Teri BartonPhoto Editor at Courier Latest posts by Teri Barton (see all) Self-Service Portfolio Exhibition at Boone Family Gallery PCC Spring 2023 - June 25, 2023 2023 VAMS Scholarship Awards Ceremony and Exhibit at the V Galle...
02/28/2023
Portrait Painter Shizu Saldamando Exhibits at PCC Galleries as Artist in Residence Momento, a solo exhibition by Shizu Saldamando, a Los Angeles-based painter who depicts American social spaces through portraiture, will open at the Galleries at Pasadena City College (PCC) on March 1 and run until April 7*. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, March 2 from 6 p.m. to 9...
02/23/2023
The Galleries at PCC Presents
Momento
by Shizu Saldamando
March 1 - April 7*
Boone Family Gallery
Mon - Sat 11a - 3p
Artist in Residence Lecture
Thurs, March 2 5p
Westerbeck Hall
Opening Reception
Thurs, March 2 6p-9p
*Gallery closed for Spring Break March 6-12 and March 31
Shizu Saldamando is painter who depicts American social spaces through portraiture. Her work suggests how race, gender, and ethnicity can be malleable and act as unnamed background in creative cultural communities. Momento is a continuation of Saldamando’s work with visual biographies but represents established artists that are in candid moments as themselves within the subtle context of the creative scenes that they help create.
The Artist in Residence program for the Galleries at PCC
is made possible by funding from the Pasadena Art Alliance.
02/25/2022
The PCC Galleries wold like to announce a new exhibtion: Cali es Cali: Otra Versión by Carolyn Castaño
March 1- April 1
11am-4pm Monday-Saturday
*Spring Break campus closed March 11-12
reception
March 3 5-7pm
Artist lecture
March 17 12pm
Artist workshop
March 18 12pm
05/19/2021
Please Check out Natalie Bookchin: Speech Network, an online exhibition of the Digital Artist in Residence through June 14.
Natalie Bookchin: Speech Network - The Galleries at Pasadena City College - Pasadena City College Speech Network is an online exhibition of internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist Natalie Bookchin who works at intersection of media, politics, and internet culture.
12/02/2020
The PCC Annual Juried Student Exhibition 2020 has now launched online! Congratulations to all the participating artists!
https://pasadena.edu/campus-life/the-arts/the-galleries/student-juried-exhibition.php
10/20/2020
The PCC Gallery will be participating in Virtual ArtNight Pasadena with our Jacci Den Hartog exhibition Blood and Boones. Come by and see us online this Friday, October 23, 6-10pm!
06/09/2020
It's been a pleasure being the gallery director for the past five years. As my post comes to an end, I wanted to say a special thank you to Charles Jones who has worked with me to mount and curate our shows with his expert attention to exhibition design, lighting and proper handling of fine artworks.
I would also like to thank the Pasadena Art Alliance for their generous funding over the years which provided the ground for me to grow as a curator, mounting solo shows in 2015-16 of: Carole Caroompas, Pierre Picot, and Sant Kalsa; in 2016-17: Kori Newkirk solo, Joshua Haycraft solo and a show of African masks from the June Harwood collection; in 2018: Tim Hawkinson solo and a 3-person show of Lynn Aldrich, Myoshi Barosh and Doug Harvey; in 2019: a Marnie Weber solo and a tandem show of Alison Raguette and Kyla Hansen; and in 2020: a Jacci Den Hartog solo and a tandem show of Abel Alejandre and Eloy Torrez.
With deep gratitude to all the artists and to the college, Mahara T. Sinclaire
Recording of Lara Schnitger guest lecture! (1 hr long video). terrific! Special thanks to Student services fund and the Pasadena Art Alliance for their generous support of our Guest Lecture Series!
an hour long video recording of guest lecture event with Los Angeles-based contemporary sculptor Lara Schnitger. Special thanks to Student Services Fund and the Pasadena Art Alliance for generous support for the Guest Lecture Series.
06/04/2020
Hi, all! I've posted the video of Jacci Den Hartog's online walk-through for her show "Blood and Bones" so you who did not get to see this terrific show could get a feel for the exhibition and enjoy hearing Jacci speak about her ideas and process.
Here is Meg Linton's excellent essay elucidating Jacci's work:
Jacci Den Hartog: Blood and Bones essay by Meg Linton
Like an ancient Song Dynasty scholar/artist/garden-designer, Jacci Den Hartog, aims to invite the blood and bones of mother earth into her studio by studying the landscape around her and bringing in those essential elements she finds compelling to study, interpret, and portray— in this case, rock and water. Usually seen as opposing matter, Den Hartog’s sculpted and painted boulders and waterfalls exist in a codependent, gravity-defying relationship. One would not be without the other. The yin-yang embrace of her standing rivers and stones are exaggerated and question the reality they are spawned from while simultaneously evoking the truth, tension, and inevitability of natural forces—eruption, erosion, growth, and decay.
An avid scholar of Chinese gardens and rock formations, Den Hartog has seemingly adapted the three formal aspects to be aimed for when building false mountains in an artificially designed landscape: t’ou, shou, and lou. 1 Her waterfall/boulder structures offer physical and symbolic passageways; they are precarious and vulnerable with their small and tenuous footings on the slick steel bases; and their fluid iridescence hints at transparency and emits a ‘hardly-there’ quality. The elongated, thin, strenuous, blue/green limbs of the water have a feminine delicacy as they lift, support, and skirt around the bulbous weighty masses as if they are dancers balancing en pointe—a sensibility admired in Chinese scholar stones. Finally, her sculptures almost weep, leak or drip, forming openings presented to all sides for us to contemplate what is either present or absent from these animated formations. More often than not, in Den Hartog’s work what is depicted or seen is equally as important as what is void or left unsaid so the viewer’s imagination may be ignited while surveying these expressive three-dimensional painted gestures.
The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has said, “Once you know the size of the waterfall, you know the size of your body. This is where it gets interesting. It’s not so much about the mountain, landscape, and the nature. It’s about us.” 2 Den Hartog’s renderings of these places she has visited—Nojoqui Falls, Millard Canyon Falls, Eaton Canyon Falls, Pheiffer Falls-Big Sur, Holy Jim Falls—are about her, us, and our place in this world. She has miniaturized the falls to a human, conversational scale. We stand with these vertical sculptures not above or below, but next to them as if they are other living bodies in the room to explore. We are able to circle the stilled, silent waterfalls and read them from multiple angles, which is not often possible in our local county and state parks, unless one takes the “tongue-n-cheek” Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, and gets to see “the backside of water” as the boat passes under Schweitzer Falls. With Den Hartog’s Giacometti-esque, contorted, cantilevered constructions she changes our position from a single proprietary sight line to an all-encompassing artificial, yet authentic, interpretation of a natural phenomenon.
Complimenting and contrasting her static falls, Den Hartog has sculpted a series of smaller rock forms with rich literary or mythic titles like “Eurydice Swept Back,” “Cyclops,” “Evil Spirit,” and “Burial at Sea.” These intimate objects made for pedestals or to hang on the wall, feel more akin to scholar rocks with their sensuous surfaces and inviting caverns and crevices. In these macro snippets of simulated stone deceptively formed by geologic or hydraulic processes, Den Hartog focuses in on the tight, squeeze-through passages of pressurized matter to lead her viewer’s eye into the underworld where water drips, seeps, and runs off in to timeless atmosphere. These sculptures depict the forensic traces of liquid over stone when it disappears from humankind’s reach and enters the subconscious world of Hades and Persephone. Places where imagination may wander freely and inspire the artist to meander us into a realm of poetics where water and boulders dance and whisper under the earth and sky. Places where Den Hartog, like the ancients she studies, may magically capture the living spirit of nature itself by sharing her composite portraits of Gaia’s flesh and blood. 3
Footnotes:
1. Pg. 161, Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden, Academy Editions, London 1978. See Li Li-weng’s formal aspects.
2. Olafur Elliason: The Design of Art, Abstract Season 2, Netflix, 2019.
3. Keswick, pg. 96.
Meg Linton
Writer, curator, and Chief Executive Officer for the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation